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It is that time again, and I am asking that you take a minute to vote on my submissions to VMWorld 2012. This year, I am focusing on End User Computing/VDI topics. I have worked on a number of VDI projects over the last year, and wanted to share some of those experiences with the community. In particular, I wanted to focus on VDI in education. Having worked on both commercial and education implementations of virtual desktop environments, there are key differentiators that can seriously impact the success of VDI in educational deployments.

My first session is “Tyler ISD: One Year Later” (session 2812). Tyler Independent School District is a large K-12 school district in East Texas, and a well respected leader in educational technology. John Orbaugh, the Tyler ISD Director of Technology, serves on a number of technology boards and committees, as well as presenting at conferences and other technology events. Just over a year ago, Tyler began deploying Phase One of a very aggressive VDI project. In Phase One, 2,500 VMware View seats were deployed on a VCE Vblock. Over the last school year, some conditions changed, software conflicts were discovered and rapid growth led to performance concerns. In this session, John and I will discuss these issues, their impact, how they were addressed, and how they impact future phases of their VDI initiative that will take their user count from 2,500 to over 15,000. This is a great session for anyone thinking about or preparing to deploy VDI within an educational environment.

My second session is “VDI in Education” (session 2872). In this session, Chris Reed and I will discuss the many nuances involved in designing and deploying VDI within an educational environment. Chris and I have each worked on a number of VDI project in both commercial and educational environments. For this session, we will focus on how educational deployments differ from commercial deployments, and how even higher education may differ from a K-12 deployment. This will address all aspects of the project lifecycle from technology selection, to budgeting and funding considerations, through to technical design and final implementation. Each step along the way has unique challenges when applied to educational institutions, and knowing how to effectively account for these challenges can improve the effectiveness of your future deployments.

Another session that I would recommend is Steve Kaplan’s session “Virtual Desktops: The Gateway to the Cloud” (session 1446). Steve is a very gifted speaker and is extremely knowledgeable. Steve has authored several books and speaks at large conferences and technology events all over the United States.

Once signed in, click on the “Filter Options” button above the sessions on the right-hand side. Simply type the word “vaughn” into the “Keywords” field and click on the Submit button. There you will find my sessions (#2812 and #2872). Please click on the “thumbs up” icon to register a vote for these sessions.

While you are there, I would also recommend the sessions with Chad Sakac of EMC and Vaughn Stewart of NetApp. I am in the vExpert program with both Chad and Vaughn, they are not only experts in storage but also excellent presenters. You leave one of their sessions entertained, well informed, and almost unaware of the fact that they work for competing storage vendors.

After that, go back to the filter options and type “Kaplan” into the Keyword field to find Steve Kaplan’s session and vote for that as well. In fact, you can type “Presidio” into the Keyword field and find sessions from myself, Steve Kaplan and some of our other colleagues at Presidio. Your votes are greatly appreciated, and I will see you at VMWorld!